Author: Josh Mull

Josh Mull aka â€œUltimate Joshâ€ is an underground citizen journalist best known for his work with TheUptake.org covering the 2008 Presidential Elections, including live video coverage of police crackdowns on peace marches at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions.
He began writing on the web as a teenager, publishing articles and reviews for Planet Unreal and other multiplayer gaming sites, later moving on to more serious subject matter on LiveJournal, Myspace, and finally here at Read or Alive. He was also one of the many citizen journalists pioneering the use of microblogs during political debates, natural disasters, and terrorist attacks, including the recent violence in Mumbai and the Gaza Strip.
In December 2008, Josh began working with Small World News (SWN) as a blog writer but has since moved on to be a Contributing Editor of Alive in Baghdad and Co-Creator of Alive in Gaza. He is also currently a contributor for Politics in the Zeros, as well as a guest contributor at Enduring America, focusing on US foreign policy in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Josh is available for media appearances and speaking engagements on a variety of matters relating to social media, citizen journalism, digital reporting, open source intelligence (OSINT), microblogging, and social networking as well as any topics relating to his research and reporting on national security, foreign policy, US elections, President Barack Obama, Iraq, the Israeli-Arab conflict, counter-insurgency (COIN), and the Global War on Terror, also known as The Long War. He has previously appeared as a guest on WAAY 31 News, BBC News, and Radio Islam.

So much ink and pixels have been spilled of late, all attempting to explain the modern conservative zeitgeist. What has possessed the Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower, to drive them to such extremes?

Where did the chaos – the craziness – come from? There are many theories on offer in the blogosphere.

Are conservatives motivated by fear of the other, fear of immigrants, Muslims, and so forth, as ED Kain suggests? Are they authoritarian, reactionary anti-progressives, the modern version of the Confederacy, as Corey Robin posits? Are they fueled by hate, racism, and vindictiveness, the desire to punish the black man in the White House, as Andrew Sullivan writes?

These are fascinating intellectual and academic diversions, but they unfortunately bring us no closer to explaining what it is we see emanating from the right wing blogosphere, from cable television and talk radio, and from Republican lawmakers themselves. We cannot read the minds and understand the hearts of conservatives. But we can read history. We can look at the practical, tangible timeline of events that has lead the Republican party to its current iteration.

After all, conservatism is just an ideology, an idea. It can be whatever we want it to be. But the US government, along with its two political parties, isn’t an idea. It’s a real-life institution.

This is the lens through which we should view the modern conservative movement. When we stop psychoanalyzing conservatives and instead look at the facts, the answers to our questions become clear.

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I am the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for Brave New Foundation. You can read my work on Firedoglake or at Rethink Afghanistan. The views expressed here are my own.

A few weeks ago, Rep. Darrell Issa, the new Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the House GOP’s self proclaimed “chief watchdog,” released his agenda for upcoming investigations in the new congress. Some of the issues he intends to focus on are dubious and partisan, but others slated for investigation are very serious.

Rep. Darrell Issa is aiming to launch investigations on everything from WikiLeaks to Fannie Mae to corruption in Afghanistan in the first few months of what promises to be a high-profile chairmanship of the top oversight committee in Congress. […]

The sweeping and specific hearing agenda shows that Issa plans to cut a wide swath as chairman, latching onto hot-button issues that could make his committee the center of attention in the opening months of the 112th Congress. By grabbing such a wide portfolio — especially in national security matters — Issa is also laying down a marker of sorts, which could cement his panel as the go-to place for investigations.

Great, if there’s one thing we need, it’s a “go-to place for investigations” in congress, especially concerning national security. Â And certainly most everyone agrees that “corruption in Afghanistan”, referring here to waste, fraud, and abuse by US military contractors, could benefit from much stronger oversight in congress.

But here’s the problem: the bloody occupation of Afghanistan has been dragging on for ten long years now, the long-term cost is estimated to be in the trillions. The catastrophes we’re facing are much, much worse than losing a million or two here or there in graft. Continue reading “War Crimes in Afghanistan? Time To Investigate”→

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I am the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for Brave New Foundation. You can read my work on Firedoglake or at Rethink Afghanistan. The views expressed below are my own.

Something very interesting has been happening with conservatives lately. They’re turning against the war in Afghanistan.

Sure, the majority of Americans have been opposed to the war for some time now, predominantly made up of Democrats and progressives. Â But there was always that nagging little problem of the Republican base, specifically their ferocious pro-war attitude.

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I am the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for Brave New Foundation. You can read my work on Firedoglake or at Rethink Afghanistan. The views expressed below are my own.

Last month we had the phony Afghanistan strategy review in Washington, and thanks to Politico, we got a shiny new buzzword: The “Progressive-Realist-Centrist Axis of Agreement”. It’s a fancypants way of saying “conventional wisdom”, roughly synonymous with the “Establishment” or Digby’s “Village”. Whatever the out-of-touch think tankers, journalists, and politicians in DC happen to think this week, that’s the “Axis of Agreement”.

The strategy review was Washington’s way of unveiling it’s brand new Axis of Agreement on the war in Afghanistan, transitioning from last year’s platinum mega-hit “COIN” (or counter-insurgency) to the new 2011 narrative. I wrote:

[The] review is not really a review of the military strategy, it’s an act of political theater. This is not the Commander in Chief and his generals tallying up their data and fine-tuning their tactical approach, this is the whole class turning in a book report so they get an A. […]

If you’re a supporter of Wikileaks, or even a relatively dispassionate observer, you likely find these actions to be offensive, or even downright criminal. How dare the US move so arrogantly, so aggressively, against Wikileaks for what seems to be nothing more than the second coming of the Pentagon Papers? We believe in free speech, in transparency and accountability for our government. It’s outrageous that Washington would move so decisively to crush a project like Wikileaks.

But are Wikileaks’ supporters actually feeding this response from the government? In our rush to rationalize and defend Wikileaks and their actions, have we inadvertently opened the door to attacks by the US government?